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John Dillon

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Joe

We would sit on the top rung
of a splintering fence and spit
cherry seeds at a moon
that couldn’t care less.

You’d stare at the rails –
not because you regretted
what you did, or what I said,
but sometimes

a white mouse with muddy eyes
would turn and dart beneath black sleepers,
splashing her pale paws in the dry night.
I used to find your socks in my bed.

Then with a jerk she would stop.
Her ears twitching cold.
Perhaps the iron track had twanged
from something farther off

than she could see.There, she waited.
Her limbs like marble dressed in stagnant light.

John Dillon is an aspiring poet from Harvard University. He has also studied at Queen’s University in Belfast under the tutelage of Medbh McGuckian. He is presently working on his thesis which compares the medieval text, Buile Shuibhne, with a sequence of poems from Heaney’s Station Island. After finishing his degree, he hopes to pursue a PhD.

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